Optimization and application of ultra-high field preclinical high-resolution and 3D 1H-MRSI using compressed sensing

Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (1H-MRSI) at ultra-high field has seen an increase in usage in the preclinical field. Challenges related to long acquisition time and low concentration of brain metabolites in the rodent brain have led to the development and application of acceleration schemes for 3D-1H-MRSI, such the undersampling technique Compressed Sensing (CS). This present study aims to explore the CS tool in the context of preclinical in vivo application in order to achieve high-resolution MRSI acquisition in both 2D with an in-plane increase and 3D/multi-slice acquisition with through-plane. The parameters are explored to achieve the highest acceleration possible as a way to make 3D as time efficient as possible. Results of the parameter study showed that an acceleration factor (AF) of 4 was possible with the right sampling size of the core at the center of the k-space. With this specific set, higher matrix size resulting in sub 1 μL nominal voxel size was explored with 2D-FID-MRSI and 9 supplementary phase-encoding/slices were added to achieve 3D-FID-MRSI. The spectral quality and the metabolic maps were accurate enough in the comparison with the non-accelerated 2D-FID-MRSI, within the slice of interest. Issues related with the point spread function (PSF) were noted throughout the different usage of CS. Our work presents a robust and effective protocol to achieve 3D-1H-MRSI using CS in order to reach an acquisition time below the 30 minutes bar, with minimal technical limitations and high-quality acquisition.